The final networking feature we are going to discuss here happens to be yet another buzzwords that some of you may have heard of already. That is Edge computing, also known as mobile edge computing or MEC. In order to understand Edge computing, we have to take a step back and understand how the current ecosystem works. Let's say that you are leveraging a real-time service such as high-definition video streaming or real-time multiplayer Cloud gaming. Let's say that the UI is located here in a 5G network. Traditionally, the gaming or the video server resides somewhere in the Internet domain, which is far beyond the domain of the 5G network operator. Just to make a quick division, here is your 5G network, whereas here is a non-5G network, such as Internet. All the performance guarantees that we have seen so far through port latency connection density, they apply to the 5G portion of the network, not to the non-5G portion of the end-to-end communication link. Which means that if your 5G network operator spends a lot of time, money and resources, optimizing and deploying the 5G network to optimize performance. If the backhaul as it is called going from the 5G network to your video or gaming server in the Internet. If that backhaul is unoptimized, then your endpoint performance is only as good as your weakest link. That weakest link would be your Internet backhaul. In that case, even though the operator painstakingly deployed and optimized the 5G network, you as the end-user, won't see a phenomenal improvement and end-to-end performance. Because your performance with your bottleneck are limited by this weakest link, which is completely beyond your 5G network operators and domain. It is in the control of Internet service providers. Is there a better way of doing it? Is there a way we can still guarantee performance improvements to the user while using 5G network? Well, there is, and that is where Edge computing comes into picture. Imagine, instead of your video or gaming server residing in the Internet domain, what if you could bring that server into the domain of your 5G operator's network. Let's say somewhere here or somewhere here, or even somewhere close to the access network. Because you are bringing the application server from the wild western unreliable domain of Internet into a reliable, trusted domain of your operator's cellular network, or rather to the edge of other cellular network, so to speak. That is the reason why this paradigm is called Edge computing. If you got the hang of it, you would have no difficulty understanding some of the apparent benefits of Edge computing in that because your application server now resides over here. There is no unreliable hop for your data packets to traverse. Because the application server resides in the operator domain, the network operator can carefully optimize the performance of data packets between the access network and a core network as well as your gaming or video server. Because your video server is effectively now in your network operator's domain, end-to-end performance can be virtually guaranteed. At such even for third-party applications such as Cloud gaming or real-time video streaming, your end-to-end performance will be something like what 5G has promised. That is a fundamental premise of Edge computing, which is about bringing our different resources, be they computational, storage, or networking resources closer to the application devices and users running those or utilizing those resources. It is essentially shift of resources from centralized data centers that are located usually far away from the user and which are travels by at least one unreliable Internet hop which acts as the weakest link. By eliminating that weakest link and bringing that application server into the trusted and optimized domain of operator's 5G network, Edge computing can easily facilitate services that require extremely strict bounds on latency, that require enhanced security, as well as additional bandwidth. This is a quick summary of some of the broader networking features that weren't invented for 5G, but rather 5G utilizes in order to improve the network performance features such as network slicing, software-defined networking and network function virtualization, and mobile Edge computing or MEC.
